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Analysis of "Power" by Audre Lorde

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The Use of “Power”

“They killed my son in cold blood,” lamented Eloise Armstead. Her husband, Add Armstead, was traveling to work with a companion on Saturday evening in the early 1970s. Thomas Shea and Walter Scott, responding to a call about a cabby that was robbed earlier that day, used this opportunity to rid the world of the wicked and gain a victory for the righteous. Walking along New York Blvd. in South Jamaica, Queens, Shea and his partner pulled alongside the two. Armstead says, as he recalls the incident, “We were walking, not saying anything to each other, and this car pulls up, and this white fella opens the door with a gun.” To him and his companion it looked like they were going to be robbed, so they ran. As the gunshots sounded, all Armstead heard was “You black son of a bitches!” While his companion cried “I’m shot!” When justice had been done, 10-year-old Clifford Glover lay dead on the scene. In that instant, the power was taken out of a 10-year-old boys hand to live a full life. Just the same as the power was taken away from his mother to watch him live that life.
A self-styled "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," writer Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her poetry, and "indeed all of her writing," according to contributor Joan Martin in Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation, "rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling." While driving, Lorde heard a radio broadcast announcing the acquittal of a white policeman who had shot and killed a black ten-year-old. She was so furious and sickened that she felt that the sky had turned red, and had to park the car before she drove it into a wall, according to a biography in Magill's Survey of American Literature. Then and there, she inscribed her feelings of outrage over

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